what does it mean for a person to choose a partner. to what degree does the person resign himself from the world in doing so. to what degree does the entire world blur before this chosen person. how mindless can the plunge into a relationship be such that the body loses control, loses its sense of orientation, loses its sense of being. such that there is no rising back again. such that there is no u-turn. the world has faded into semi-oblivion, and the person has surrendered to the pull (and hold) of a new magnetism, a new axis. is now a powerless atom in a magnetic field and has totally let go. and what if the partner still has control, still has a will, still has a mind, still has a world.

in yoga class yday the instructor asked us if we could lay on our backs and raise our legs up and then slowly rotate them to come above our head such that the feet touched the mat behind the head. and she said something very important. make sure you don't push yourself beyond where you can go. make sure you don't lose your sense of orientation, your sense of where and in what position you are with respect to the ground... its a deep thought. the fear of falling does not scare one as much as the panic of not knowing how one is oriented, how one is positioned. only when one knows that, can one soften the fall, or pick oneself up successfully after a fall. only when one knows that, does one have any control. without the knowledge of which way the certainty of earth lies, one is utterly lost. and that's why the panic. it gives one a stricken feeling of hopelessness, of extreme vulnerability, of being powerless.

yday for the first time i realized i could do it. that i could actually feel the ground beneath my feet, above my head. that so far i panicked only because my mind thought it was contrary to what it had always known - the head above the ground beneath my feet.

but its not always so simple to be conscious of one's orientation with respect to the force before which one is futile.